The Stars in Medieval Eyes

The modern model of the physical universe helps us to understand outer space. The medieval model helps us to understand ourselves.

In the book Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, a philosophically minded physician named Thomas Cowan recounts the story of a lecture he attended while in medical school. The context at this point in the book is a discussion of how our health is affected not only by the world around us but also by our perception of that world. The lecture, given by an educator who had studied both astronomy and physics, began with these words:

The single most important concept that you must deeply understand if you are to know, really know, anything about the stars, or planets, or yourself, is ... that the Earth is still and the sun, planets, and stars rotate around us.

This occurred in the twentieth century. The speaker had no intention of denying the heliocentric astronomical model that we all learn in school. Rather, he was honoring the geocentric model as a cultural and psychological reality that emerges from our raw experience and poetic observations of the physical universe. To banish or ridicule classical geocentrism, with its vast revolving orbs and enchanting geometrical elegance, is to create a stress fracture in the structure of the human person: the cosmos as we naturally perceive it, we are told, is an illusion. The sun doesn’t actually rise, the moon doesn’t glow with its own light, the stars are scattered through unfathomable expanses of space, and the earth is not the center of anything. In short, what our senses and our feelings tell us about one of the most fundamental and awe-inspiring dimensions of human existence—namely, the earth and the heavens—is wrong.

For modern folks, this rupture between sensory experience and intellectual knowledge—that is, between body and mind—is unavoidable. Astronomical discoveries cannot be un-discovered, and few people would want them to be. Furthermore, perhaps this mind–body fracture can, if we acknowledge it and seek to heal it, make us stronger: instead of assuming that the geocentric model is a physical reality, as Europeans did long before the Middle Ages, we can consciously place it in harmony with the work of modern science. We can commit ourselves to the belief that both empirical science and traditional cosmology teach us the wonders of the universe, but rather like prose and poetry, one speaks more to our intellects, and the other more to our hearts.

Nevertheless, the modern astronomical mentality can be difficult to overcome, and there are times when it seems that the medieval understanding of the cosmos was a shorter and easier path to personal wholeness.

Medieval culture inherited its geocentric cosmology from ancient Greece, and primarily from Aristotle. Its key features are as follows:

1. The world, or what we would call the universe, consists of two domains, one terrestrial (comparable to the earth with its atmosphere) and the other celestial (the heavens).

2. The terrestrial region is motionless, located in the geometric center of the cosmos, and composed of earth, water, air, and fire. All living and nonliving substances in the terrestrial region arise from interactions between these four elements, which are always in flux.

3. The celestial region consists of the moon, the planets, and the stars. These heavenly bodies move with perfect, unending circular motion around the earth. They don’t revolve as isolated objects, though. They are carried by concentric, hollow spheres (known as “orbs”) made not of terrestrial elements but of a pure and unchanging “ether,” a term related to Greek words that suggest sky, air, and radiance.

4. The boundary between the terrestrial region and the celestial region is the inner surface of the orb that carries the moon, and then moving outward, we pass sequentially through orbs for Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. After Saturn are three more orbs for the stars.

5. Beyond the outermost orb is the Empyrean, which is a theological realm rather than a cosmological structure, and which comes to English from Greek words meaning “in fire.” Eternally immoveable and suffused with pristine light, the Empyrean heaven is the dwelling place of God, the Prime Mover, who communicates time and motion to all of Creation. His instruments in producing this motion are immaterial “intelligences” that medieval scholars interpreted as angels.

The classical-medieval geocentric model of Creation is quite simply an artistic masterpiece. A Romantic poet might say that it is too beautiful to be false. At once soothing, thought-provoking, and sublime, it fills the mind with transcendent sensations of stability, order, regularity, proportion, graceful movement, and divine providence. The entire universe is envisioned as a hierarchical and harmonious community of human beings, spiritual beings, heavenly bodies, and God.

Notice how this model places us in the center of everything (which is where mankind’s instinctual desires seem to lead), but without exalting us as Humanism does or isolating us as Materialism does. Humanity is the focal point of the universe, yet we are utterly dependent on higher beings without whom our lives and our world would, quite literally, stop.

As I mentioned above, philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages did not invent this cosmology. Though they molded it somewhat according to Christian principles, we cannot claim that it is the fruit of medieval culture. But we must then reverse the relationship and ask a crucial question: To what extent, and in what ways, was medieval culture the fruit of classical cosmology? Did this model of the universe underlie or intensify the “wisdom, beauty, passion, and interior peace” that I have found in the medieval world and that this newsletter is intended to share? What might some imaginative geocentrism—not as factual astronomy but as poetic cosmology—do for modern culture?

These aren’t easy questions to answer, but they’re worth asking.

The phases of the moon, from a twelfth-century cosmography codex written as a textbook for monks.

Diverse voices join to make sweet notes,
and thus the diverse orders of our life
sing out among these spheres sweet harmony.¹

One of the most captivating details of medieval cosmology is the “music of the spheres.” According to this theory, the rotation of the celestial spheres produces sounds that differ in pitch and blend into a supremely beautiful cosmic harmony—the everlasting and omnipresent song of Creation. Surely, the astonishing power of harmonious music to “exalt the soul and sway the heart of man,” as the ancient scholar Longinus wrote, originates in some sort of cosmic symphony. If nothing else, the music of the spheres is an allegory for the many sonorous and melodious sounds of the natural world—such as the chorus of bird song that I hear on summer mornings like this one.

The harmony of the spheres, from the same twelfth-century textbook mentioned above. The planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon) are labeled as “tone,” “semitone,” or “three semitones.”

Normally, we can’t hear this exquisite celestial music, perhaps because our ears are overwhelmed by it, as Cicero claimed, or perhaps because our sense of hearing has been corrupted by sin, as Milton suggested. Apparently Shakespeare’s view was similar to Milton’s:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubims.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.²

The music of the spheres was actually a rather controversial idea. It began with the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras and was later endorsed by Plato and Cicero (but not Aristotle), dismissed by early Christian thinkers, revived by scholars of the early Middle Ages, and again rejected by medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas. For poets, though, the appeal of a musical universe was a strong one—perhaps too strong for philosophical objections. In the first canto of Paradiso, Dante wrote of a heavenly harmony blended and attuned by God, and Milton enriched Paradise Lost with much musical imagery. I’ll leave you with some of his lines from Book 4:

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise His works behold
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole or responsive each to other’s note
Singing their great Creator. Oft in bands,
While they keep watch or nightly rounding walk,
With Heav’nly touch of instrumental sounds
In full harmonic number joined, their songs
Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven.

1. Dante, Paradiso, canto 6.

2. The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1.